State and federal reforms of the 1990s transformed the U.S. cash assistance program forsingle parents and their children. Despite an extensive literature examining these changesand their impacts, there have been few studies that consider the effects of these reformsfrom the perspective of the...

This paper presents nonexperimental net impact estimates for the Adult and Dislocated Worker programs under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), the primary federal job training program in the U.S, based on administrative data from 12 states, covering approximately 160,000 WIA participants and...

We evaluate the labor-market returns to General Educational Development (GED) certification using state administrative data. We develop a fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) method to account for the fact that GED test takers can repeatedly retake the test until they pass it. Our technique can...

State and federal reforms of the 1990s transformed the U.S. cash assistance program for single parents and their children. Despite an extensive literature examining these changes and their impacts, there have been few studies that consider the effects of these reforms from the perspective of the...

This paper provides novel evidence on the labor-market returns to proprietary (also called for-profit) postsecondary school attendance. Specifically, we link administrative records on proprietary school attendance with quarterly earnings data for nearly 70,000 students. Because average age at...

Temporary Help Services (THS) employment has been growing in size, particularly among disadvantaged workers, and in importance in balancing cyclical fluctuations in labor demand. Does THS employment provide some benefits to disadvantaged workers, or divert them from better jobs? We investigate...

Although many programs redistribute resources in the U.S., two program were central in providing a safety net for those facing hardship during the Great Recession: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which grew to 47.7 million people in January 2013 – or 15.1 percent of all...

In this paper we empirically examine differences in search behavior between men andwomen. We assess hypotheses regarding duration of search, wages and tenure. Thehypotheses are derived from two models: the equilibrium search model with discriminatoryfirms by Black (1995) and an opportunity cost...

We analyze the way women's education influences the effect of children on their level of labor market involvement. We propose an econometric model that accounts for the endogeneity of labor market and fertility decisions, for the heterogeneity of the effects of children and their correlation...

Much is known about private returns to education in the form of higher earnings. Less is known about social value, over and above the private, market value. Associations between education and socially-desirable outcomes are strong, but disentangling the effect of education from other causal...